Day: July 9, 2012

The Cool Master is a beer delivery system which Innovation Thirst built as their qualifying entry for this year’s Red Bull Creation contest. It’s one of the best beer delivery concepts we’ve ever seen. Instead of tossing you a beer directly from the fridge, this offering brings the cold beverages directly to you. It even manages to de-cap the bottles before serving.

Mobility is provided by a six-wheeled base which allows for a zero-turn radius. The cooler acts as the body of the robot, and hides a hopper which carries a stock of bottles on their sides. When you want a beer, the bot approaches you, tilts the next bottle to the upright position, removes the cap, then raises the vessel on a beer elevator until it pushes its way through the rubber orifice in the cooler’s lid. Right now the device is operated using an RC controller, but there’s always room for adding autonomy and the ability to restock from a refrigerator. Don’t miss the demo video after the break.

Here’s a interesting idea; if the hardware seen above is dropped at a location, you can monitor radio signals remotely via the Internet. [MS3FGX] has been toying with the idea for a little while now. He wanted to use a DVB dongle with a portable Linux solution to offer Software-Defined Radio (SDR) capability without the need to actually be there.

The white box is a PWN Plug, a branded version of the SheevaPlug. The black dongle that plugs into it is a DVB tuner dongle. It’s meant to receive television signals over the radio, but recently the hardware has been used as a simple way to implement SDR. Combine the two (along with the antenna), stir in a network connection, and you’ve got a remote listening post. What can you listen to? Just about anything that’s within the dongle’s bandwidth range. [MS3FGX] mentions walkie-talkie traffic and pager signals, to name just two.

When she was showing off the project at Maker Faire we really only got a cursory look at what it could do. Her most recent video covers all that went into pulling off the project. Once the bulk of the guitar body was gone she tore the guts out of a dead c64 in order to mate the case with the guitar neck. Always the craftsman, she altered the computer’s badge to preserve the iconic look, then went to work adding pickups to each string using piezo sensors. This was done with Maker Faire in mind because magnetic pickups would have been unreliable around all of the tesla coils one might find at the event. These were amplified and filtered before being processed via an FPGA which connects to the original c64 SID 6581 chip.

The platform is a quad-core Calxeda EnergyCore ARM SoC. Each chip draws only 5 Watts at full load, with eight chips weighing in at just 40 Watts. The circuit to power the server started as a solar charger, which was easy to convert just by transitioning from panels to a generator that works just like a bicycle trainer (the rear wheel presses against a spin wheel which drives the generator shaft).

So, the bicycle generator powers the solar charger, which is connected to an inverter that feeds a UPS. After reading the article and watching the video after the break we’re a bit confused on the actual setup. We would think that the inverter would feed the charger but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. If you can provide some clarity on how the system is connected please feel free to do so in the comments.

The accuracy which [Mario] achieved in his pen plotter dot matrix printer is very remarkable. He tore through a pile of floppy drives to get the parts he wanted, and chose to go with a fine-point Sharpie marker as a print head. In the video after the break he flatters us with a printout of the Hackaday logo, but you also get a look at one problem with the build. The ink doesn’t always flow from the felt tip and he has to coax it (almost like priming a pump) with a piece of scrap paper.

He was inspired by the pen printer we featured back in June. This rendition features a printing area of 1.5×1.5 inches that can accommodate 120×120 black and white pixels. He’s not a microcontroller type of guy and is driving the printer from the parallel port of his computer.

The best printing technique puts the pen down and moves it around just a bit (helps prevent the ink flow problem we mentioned earlier) and produces images like one in the lower right. We love the 8-bit nature of the result and would use this all the time to make our own greeting cards.

[Gustaf] has been playing around with machine vision for a while and sent in his latest project in on our tip line. It’s a video based car radar system that can detect cars in a camera’s field of vision while cruising down the highway.

Like [Gustaf]’s previous experiments with machine vision where he got a computer to recognize and count yellow cylinders and green rectangles, the radar build uses ADABoost and the AForge AI/Machine Vision C# framework. [Gustef] used an evolutionary algorithm to detect the presence of a car in a video frame, first by selecting 150 images of cars from a pre-recorded video, and the another 1,850 images were selected by a computer and confirmed as a car by a human eye.

With 2000 images of cars in its database, [Gustaf]’s machine vision algorithm is able to detect a car in real-time as he drove down a beautiful Swedish highway. In addition to overlaying a rectangle underneath each car in a video frame and an awesome Terminator-style HUD in the upper right corner, [Gustaf] also a distance display above the hood of his car.

It’s an awesome build that makes us wonder if [Gustef] is building an autonomous car. Even if he’s not, it really makes us want to install a video HUD in our whip, just to see this in action.

Here’s a 6-channel logic analyzer shield for the MSP430 Launchpad. It manages an eyebrow-raising 16 million samples per second. The prototype seen above is made on a hunk of protoboard with point-to-point soldering. [oPossum] did lay out a PCB — which is just 50mmx50mm — but has not had any produced quite yet.

He calls it the LogicBoost, and based it on the the LogicShrimp design. The sextuplet of 8-pin chips are all SPI RAM. These are responsible for storing the samples, with a 74HC573 latch routing the traffic. The MSP430 chip provides the SPI clock, and the Launchpad’s virtual com port can be used to push the data to a computer for graphing. That’s a bit slow so [oPossum] also included an optional header for an FTDI board that will do a faster job. The sample rate can be adjusted by tweaking the internal oscillator setting of the chip; there’s plenty to choose from so it will work for just about any purpose (as long as you don’t surpass the 16 Msps speed limit).